December 20, 2007 11:06am
Mozilla Developer News » Blog Archive » Firefox 3 Beta 2 now available for download
Posted by michael.twofishComments
Performance improvements such as: better data reliability for user profiles, architectural improvements to speed up page rendering, over 330 memory leak fixes, a new XPCOM cycle collector to reduce entire classes of leaks, and reductions in the memory footprint.
I've never written a big piece of software, so maybe this is an unreasonable question to ask, but how did 330 memory leaks get into Firefox in the first place? The Fox is definitely my preferred browser but it's piss poor performance has been bugging the shit out of me lately, and I have been considering using it only for development and using something else for day-to-day browsing. Performance boosts more than welcome.
December 21st, 2007 at 10:36am
I agree with you. I actually reported a memory leak for 2.0.0.9 myself.
Dealing with the system level memory leaks is a common issue for a big code like Firfox's. And with Windows' not-so-well-managed memory allocation, it is even more likely to happen than the other OS.
Comparing memory usage for a google.com home page on my PC. Firefox takes the lead by keeping away 75MB!! that is huge considering that we are talking about a 11kB loaded page , in 2nd place comes Safari for Windows eating 42Migs and Finally IE6 with 27Migs.
Of course plugins/extensions would dramatically increase Firefox's memory consumption. To be frank, I would give up my precious firefox for an extensible, pluginable Safari. But that's just me :)
December 21st, 2007 at 11:44am
I seem to recall one of the reasons that Firefox came into existence was that Mozilla browser was getting too bloated. Or was that a delusional dream I had?
But, I also would consider switching to Safari if it was more flexible and developed the tool support. And I suspect many more people would too. So it's not just you :)